Miss Renault is able to write about ancient Greece as if she had been there. I don't know whether I admire this gift of hers more in the Theseus novels, where her imagination was free to build as it could on a meager foundation of facts, or in the Athenian novels, which might so easily have suffered from an excess of documentation…. The world Miss Renault shows us is sufficiently in harmony with the one we have read about in history books, and yet it is a world she has created….
As we follow [the] apprenticeship and rise to fame [of Nikeratos, the narrator of The Mask of Apollo,] we get a fresh sense of what the classic Greek theater was like and what it meant to the Greek people in a score of Mediterranean cities…. A mask of Apollo, with which he carries on imaginary conversations, symbolizes his devotion not only to his art but also to the good, the true, and the beautiful. In the long run the symbol is overworked, but it leads to several impressive passages.
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